The Works of Walter Leslie Wilmshurst
Brief Masonic Biography
The Meaning of Masonry
The Masonic Initiation
The Ceremony of Initiation
The Ceremony of Passing
Notes on Cosmic Consciousness
The Fundamental Philosophic Secrets Within Masonry
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
The Mystical Basis of Freemasonry
Reason and Vision
The Working Tools of an Old York Master
Spurious Ecstasy and Ceremonial Magic
Wilmshurst's Tracing Board of the Centre
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From the Occult Review March 1910
REVIEW - THE HIDDEN CHURCH OF THE HOLY GRAAL
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. By A. E. Waite. London:
Rebman, Ltd.
by W. L. Wilmshurst
What was, and is, the Holy Graal? Not to waste space in
considering fatuous imaginings concerning any material reliquary that
may once have served at a certain sacred feast and was supposed
subsequently to have been concealed at Glastonbury or elsewhere, be
it remembered that there has obtained no extensive or important
system of religious expression, whether ethnic or Christian, but has
instinctively formulated the conception of a feeding-dish
communicating supernatural food; a cauldron brimming with some
celestial brew; a cornucopia, bowl, or horn of plenty, exuberant with
luscious fruits; each the symbol of that mystical, invisible, but
unfailing cup or platter from which the inward life of man is, by all
save those unconscious of an inward life, felt to be sustained. The
Holy Graal is the gracious Christianized form of this catholic
symbol. Besides the cup itself, it involves also the content of the
cup; the Sangreal, or sacred vessel, as if language itself refused to
dissociate the inward content from the outward vehicle, is also the
Sang Real, the Royal Blood, or life-giving Spirit, imparted
therefrom.
In its chief sacrament the official Christian Church perpetuates,
after one manner or another, a rite or office whereby, it is taught,
supernatural sustenance is communicated to the human soul. But if the
doctrine affirmed in most schools of religious philosophy be correct
— namely, that that which is below is in correspondence with
that which is above, and that visible things are patterns of
invisible, it follows that the terrestrial office is a shadow of a
celestial one; that the Church militant upon earth is the reflection
of a Church triumphant beyond this earth, and that the sacramental
bread and wine of the former have their appropriate, exalted, and
sublimated counterparts in the latter.
Suppose it, then, possible for human consciousness to transcend
terrestrial shadow-shapes, however sacred; to soar beyond the
sacramental symbols inevitable to the perishable plane of existence,
and to participate in the imperishable reality which, out of normal
ken, stands behind the symbol and renders that symbol both possible
and valid ! Well, so to do would be to gain access to an interior
Church hidden from this world and to partake of the arch-natural
Eucharist therein celebrated. In other words, it would be to achieve
that quest of the Holy Graal, to which, as its goal and summum bonum,
the knighthood of religio-romance literature was self-dedicated. That
knighthood no wise abjured or neglected the instituted temporal rite
of which we all know something. Rather did it strive to penetrate
beyond the sacramental symbol and to find that symbol's legitimate
and natural, or rather arch-natural, extension upon the spiritual
plane. The symbol held good pro tanto; it was the conduit, the
promise, and the substitution in time and space of a vital reality
existent beyond those limitations; it was the base from which the
questing knights operated and advanced. They dared not neglect the
formal rite, but they ever realized that — "A substitute
shines brightly as a king. Until the king be by and then his state
empties itself, as doth an inland brook into the main of waters ";
and the objective of their quest was the transcending of symbol and
substitute by attaining conscious cognition of the King — of
kings — Himself.
Listen to the simple, stately prose of Malory describing Galahad's
achievement of the Graal in Castle Corbenic:—
"It seemed them that there came a man and four angels from
heaven, clothed in the likeness of bishops, and had a cross in his
hand; and the four angels bear him up in a chair, and set him down
before the table of silver where the Sandgreal was ; and it seemed
that he had in the midst of his forehead letters that said, "See
ye here, Joseph, the first bishop of Christendom, the same which our
Lord succoured in Sarras, in the spiritual place" . . . And then
the bishop made semblance as though he would have gone to the
consecrating of the mass, and then he took a wafer, which was made in
the likeness of bread; and at the lifting up there came a figure in
the likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as
any fire, and smote himself into that bread, so that they all saw the
bread was formed of a fleshy man. And then he put it into the holy
vessel again and then he did that belonged unto a priest to do at
mass. . . . Then looked they and saw a man come out of the holy
vessel, that had all the signs of the passion of Jesus Christ,
bleeding all openly, and said, "My knights, and my servants, and
my true children, which be come out of deadly life, I will now no
longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secret and
of my hidings. Now hold and receive the high meat which ye have so
much desired.
It seems a far cry from these high mysteries to the body
ecclesiastic we know; to its record of heresies and schisms; its
conflicts concerning Transubstantiation and the Real Presence. But to
recognize this fact is essential to the point to which I am leading
up. Centuries ago Galahad achieved the quest, but, it is recorded,
"since then was there never no man so hardy for to say that he
had seen the Sancgreal." It, and what it connotes, owing to
human imperfection, was withdrawn into concealment. The inner Church
passed out of men's thought and consciousness, leaving the
terrestrial Church desolate and in widowhood, practising maimed and
impoverished rites; a cloud, as it were, resting upon the sanctuary.
Yet, the legends run, there was given large promise of the
restoration of the Graal; and of the remanifesting upon a larger
scale than aforetime of all that was removed into hiddenness. And
through the long years of inhibition and withdrawal the hidden Church
has continued its work in silence but in real activity, whereof
abundant tokens exist for those who have an eye for them. Finding no
response in its external counterpart it has made its voice heard
unmistakably elsewhere, not in its old-time tones, but in varying and
feigned terms, if haply some few, hearing, might discern or be
brought to the understanding of the withdrawn mysteries; terms of
"subterfuge and allegory; terms of Alchemy, of Kabalism, of
Rosicrucianism, of Masonry, of Templarism, of sundry secret schools;
yet terms proclaiming, beneath whatsoever veils, always the same
message, urging ever the same doctrine; the doctrine, that of the
possibility of human regeneration; the message, that in due time the
King will return to that Kingdom within us which we affirm in every
Paternoster to be His.
So much may be premised by way of introduction to what is perhaps
the most important and effective treatise upon Christian mysticism as
yet published. Hitherto the Graal legends and romances have been the
province, well nigh exclusively, of students of folklore and
mediaeval letters, who have found in them only such worth as their
special equipment enabled them to perceive. Even for them, when all
has been said, there has remained over (as in the faint recognition
of the idea of a Graal Church existing concurrently with but
interiorly to the official Church of the day) a certain surplusage of
refractory material, irresolvable because out of affinity with that
which canons of folklore and scholarship are adapted to treat. But it
is just this excess which, as Mr. Waite points out, belongs to, and
is explicable only by, the mystic. And it is this which gives
students of the varieties of mystical religious expression the clue
to the facts that the Graal literature is one of concealed intention;
that it is the ashes, as it were, of a great fire; the records of a
great religious experience; the reminiscences of a school of
initiation into those mysteries the existence of which in Christian
times has been, and still is, as veritable a fact as the old-time
mysteries of Egypt, of Chaldea, and of Greece. "It is only in
its mystic sense that the Graal literature can repay study," Mr.
Waite asserts. His book, accordingly is addressed exclusively to, and
is intelligible only by, readers of mystical tendencies. From the
standpoint of mysticism alone, therefore, it is best to speak of it
here, though, to the credit of its author's own abundant erudition,
it must be recorded that, to justify his conclusions, he has
skilfully collated and co-ordinated that literature, and at one
stride has both met official scholarship upon its own ground and
altogether surpassed its achievements by virtue of having applied to
the subject his own special gifts and appropriate equipment.
Quite probably the customary reproach will be urged at him that
the mystic has read into his subject more than was ever there or
intended to be there. One might as ineptly complain at Ruskin for
deducing ethics from the dust of the earth; or at Wordsworth for
seeing more in a primrose than did Peter Bell. The most commercially
minded may recall that even upon the material plane fortunes have
been made by discerning eyes that have seen the potential value of
waste products or that have detected diamonds or gold nuggets where
others saw but clay-mire or river-gravel. Is the exercise of the like
faculty to be denied the religious mystic who, recognizing the marks
and signs-manual of fellow-mystics who have trodden the path that
leads from natural to supernatural life before him, is able out of
his own knowledge to interpret them, and out of his own experience to
vouch for their veracity? The objection referred to notwithstanding,
henceforth all consideration of the Graal literature, whether of that
known or of that yet untraced, is destined to be subjected to the
criterion of Mr. Waite's interpretation; and, to dismiss the merely
academic aspect of the subject, it may be asserted confidently that
future scholarship will confirm rather than discredit the deductions
he has reached. If the large and often conflicting Graal literature
be, as Mr. Waite suggests, a progress from chaos towards order; a
series, that is, of graduated efforts on the part of an old-world age
to express, in terms of chivalry, the perennial problem, and to
disclose the perpetual secret, of individual reintegration into that
primal sanity humanity enjoyed before the Fall into matter, —
efforts culminating in the record of the attainment of the Graal by
Galahad, the perfected spiritual aspirant, — so, after a like
manner, the extensive, but inconclusive, modern interrogation of that
literature may be said to culminate here in this exhaustive and
convincing volume by the most appropriately equipped of literary
knights.
Mr Waite has given us, however, not merely an exposition of the
meaning and purpose of the Graal literature. His work is a guidebook
to a variety of other mystical systems that since the outward Church
became desolated have sprung up, have perpetuated in other forms a
cognate doctrine, and have left behind them traces of their
affiliation to that unmanifested centre which is none other than the
Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. Casual inquirers into the perplexing
literature of Alchemy have long desired some simple statement of what
all that strange commixture of religion and chemistry really means.
The equally monstrous unintelligibilities of Hermeticism and
Kabalism; the doubtful value, historical and otherwise, of
semi-secret schools of symbolic doctrine such as Masonry — all
systems apparently foreign to, and yet not subversive of, orthodox
doctrine and official religious institutions — have long needed
justifying, interpreting, and co-ordinating. Mr Waite has supplied
this need, and has furnished us with a common denominator to them
all. He establishes beyond controversy the fact that they are all
voices crying in the wilderness, in different tones, but expressive
all of one truth, and testifying all to a common but concealed source
of inspiration.
Is there now for the plain wayfaring man who is unable or
unwilling to tread these devious paths of apparent heterodoxy any
instructional method ready to hand whereby he may enter upon the
heritage promised by them all? Can he, not being a knight-errant,
behold the Graal to-day Can he, no alchemist, transmute base metals
into gold; or, no builder of temples, discover a certain lost secret,
by which he may rear one? Well, in each of these cases the goal is
the same, and all the various methods of attainment are reducible to
one; that one, as Mr. Waite succeeds in demonstrating, being involved
in the true perception of the Catholic office of the Mass; an office
which, in whatever other respects the Latin Church may have deflected
from its purpose, it yet, by an unerring instinct, has perpetuated
and preserved from desecration as a channel of supernatural grace and
a criterion for universal guidance. It is perhaps a strange claim to
be made by one outside that Church and to readers many of whom will
be prejudiced against its communion. But Mr. Waiters claim is not
used at all as an argument for enlistment in the Roman Church. He
knows too well that the offices of grace are administered upon all
hands and are not restricted to any one ecclesiastical penfold. As an
expert, if the term be permitted, in mysticism and symbolism, he
merely records and emphasizes, with equal sincerity and impartiality,
the fact that, despite all withdrawals of the hallows, despite all
spiritual blindness in official places, one eloquent witness to a
supernal sacrament has always survived, and that all other symbolic
and mystical systems find their simplest and readiest expression in
the Roman Office of the Mass. As in a great cathedral are found
lesser shrines devoted to special purposes, and chapels subsidiary to
the main sanctuary, so Mr Waite's thesis is designed to show that all
mystical schools and systems outside the main current of historic
orthodoxy have in reality been but accessory to it; specialized forms
appropriate at certain eras and to certain minds; yet all
over-spanned by one common, embracing roof, and all capable of
finding their diversified methods of expression unified at one
central high altar. The alchemic mystery, for example, as Mr Waite
proves, is put with almost naked simplicity in Eucharistic doctrine.
To understand the Mass is to hold the key to all other mystical
systems.
I have left small space for reference to Mr. Waite's most
important and instructive pronouncement upon the nature of that
Hidden Church, which, never slumbering nor sleeping, has through the
centuries of inhibition, watched over all the external churches and
schools. Something of this unmanifested communion of saints we have
learned before from those enlightening letters of Eckhartshausen's in
The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, and from other less well-known sources.
Henceforth all such voices will find fuller and co-ordinated
expression in Mr. Waite's earnest and impressive closing pages. He
defines it variously as the integration of sanctified souls in the
higher consciousness; the cohort of just men made perfect; the lower
mind of the official Churches raised to a higher plane of
self-realization and rendered conscious of the unmanifested life
involved within itself. It is not an organized community in time and
space, and yet life within physical limitations need be no
disqualification for admission there into. It is briefly that hidden
House into which, in the passage quoted above, the purified spirit of
man, typified by Galahad, is described as entering and participating
in the celebration of the supreme mysteries of being; that House into
which, as the Graal romances tell, and as our experience attests, the
hallows have for a season been withdrawn, leaving a widowed Church
with but their substitution, though not without promise of their
restoration.
Is Mr. Waite's book — as I have said, the most luminous and
important work upon Christian mysticism yet given us — a
presage that that restoration is impending? That is a question that
will be answered affirmatively or negatively according to the measure
of enlightenment and mystical consciousness of him to whom it is put.
Assuredly no one will read this book without asking it of himself,
and without wondering why, at the present juncture in human affairs,
when the questing spirit for the things of final import is rife
amongst us, so momentous an elucidation of matters that for so long
have remained veiled and close-guarded should have taken place. And
no understanding reader will close it without gratitude and without
praying that it may fulfil its author's purpose of helping many upon
the path of attainment of that of which his book treats.
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